Statistical excellence in journalism

The above photo shows John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times receiving the 'Data visualisation' award from RSS president Peter Diggle & Vice president for external affairs Jenny Freeman at the RSS 2016 awards ceremony.

We are now accepting entries for the 2017 Awards

About our awards

We established our awards for statistical excellence in journalism in 2007 to encourage excellence in journalists’ use of statistics to question, analyse and investigate the issues that affect society. The awards have previously been scooped by reporters from the BBC, the Guardian and the Economist and the Financial Times and celebrate the great strides that have been made in journalist’s use of numbers to tell a story.

Criteria

Entries will be expected to show integrity in their presentation, explanation and use of statistics – avoiding distortion and highlighting the extent of uncertainties. Please note we can only accept submissions for work completed in 2016.

The awards are open to all journalists (print, online and broadcast), including those based outside the UK. All entries will be judged equally and each journalist may submit a maximum of three entries.

Categories

The categories for 2017 are as follows:

Explaining the Facts: recognising journalism that has dissected important statistics to make them more accessible and understandable to the wider public.
Investigative Journalism: recognising journalism that has used original research and analysis of data to uncover a story.
Regional Journalism: recognising the excellent use of data and promotion of the role of statistics in society in local or regional media.
Data Visualisation: recognising the use of creative visual representation to illustrate complex data.